We all know that primes are numbers that can only be divided by themselves and 1 (such as 2,3,5,7, etc). But what would be the highest prime number you can think of? The largest prime number known so far is 257,885,161-1, a 17,425,170 digit number. The new largest-known prime is the third discovered by Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri, who was running Gimps software on 1,000 university computers. It took one of the PCs 39 days of non-stop computing to check it was indeed prime.

The easiest way to remember the value of Pi (3.1415926) is by counting each word’s letter in ‘May I have a large container of coffee’

The equal sign ‘=’ was invented by an English mathematician in 1557. In his book Robert Recorde explains: ‘…to avoid the tedious repetition of these words: “is equal to”, I will set (as I do often in work use) a pair of parallels, or Gemowe lines, of one length (thus =), because no two things can be more equal.’

The only number in English that is spelled with its letters in alphabetical order is ‘forty’.

How do you make Maths fun? Young children are drawn to math-related games, mainly because for them it’s a game , not a math problem. You can browse through some of our best math apps for kids that will help arouse and motivate their interest in the subject.